Tag Archives: Vincent Price

Samuel Fuller didn’t suffer from sophomore slump when he directed his second picture, The Baron of Arizona. It’s every bit as good as his first film, I Shot Jesse James (1949), and boasts a great lead performance by Vincent Price and gorgeous black & white cinematography by James Wong Howe.

James Wong Howe is arguably the greatest cinematographer of black & white films of all time, and Fuller was lucky to get him at a low rate. The Baron of Arizona had a small budget and was shot in just 15 days, but it looks like an “A” picture. The cinematography is a big part of this, and Price’s pitch-perfect performance as a louche swindler is another.

Price plays James Addison Reavis, a real historical figure who attempted to defraud the U.S. government by forging land grants in order to take possession of more than 18,000 square miles of the central Arizona Territory and the western New Mexico Territory in the late 19th century.

Vincent Price is best known today as a horror icon, so many people forget that he wasn’t always associated with the horror genre. I always enjoy watching his early performances (and listening to him play “The Saint” on the radio), and the character he plays in The Baron of Arizona is perfectly suited to his talents.

Price was an actor who always seemed to be chuckling at a joke that none of the other actors in the film were privy to, and that quality works perfectly for the character he plays in The Baron of Arizona.

With just two films as a director under his belt, Samuel Fuller was already establishing himself as a filmmaker who could make entertaining, fast-moving, low-budget pictures that had hidden depths. Just like I Shot Jesse James, The Baron of Arizona uses the tropes of the western to turn an American myth on its head.

The Baron of Arizona takes the classic American idea of the “self-made man” and draws it out to its most audacious and unethical conclusion.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that I have a special place in my heart for Deanna Durbin.

I think Durbin is one of the most charming, talented, and attractive performers to ever appear on screen. If some of the material she appeared in was beneath her, it’s hard to tell, since she brought the same vivacity, humor, and clear-as-a-bell singing voice to every one of her roles.

Durbin — a.k.a. “Winnipeg’s Sweetheart” — went from nearly single-handedly saving Universal Pictures from bankruptcy at the age of 14 with her first feature, Three Smart Girls (1936), to permanently retiring from acting in 1948 after appearing in her last film, For the Love of Mary.

Up in Central Park was Durbin’s penultimate picture. She was nearly 27 years old, and was tired of working within a stultifying studio system and playing the same type of character she’d been playing since she was 14. After appearing in For the Love of Mary, Durbin married producer Charles David and settled in a small village in rural France. She never appeared in another film.

Up in Central Park was based on the successful Broadway musical of the same name that opened in 1945. It takes place in 19th-century New York and stars another of my all-time favorite actors — Vincent Price — as the notoriously corrupt Boss Tweed.

Wide-eyed Irish immigrant Rosie Moore (Durbin) and her father, Timothy Moore (Albert Sharpe), come to New York with dreams of a better life and are quickly ensnared by the agents of Boss Tweed, who set up Mr. Moore with a plum position as Central Park zookeeper, as well as a little house in the park to call their own.

When things seem too good to be true, they usually are. But Rosie loves her new life, so when a crusading reporter for The New York Times named John Matthews (played by crooner Dick Haymes) tries to convince her that Boss Tweed and his Tammany Hall cronies are no good, she refuses to believe him.

Up in Central Park is an entertaining little musical, but my favorite thing about it was watching the louche Price woo the naive Durbin, as well as chew the scenery on his own. For instance, when Tweed gives his puppet mayor Oakley (Hobart Cavanaugh) his cigar to dispose of and Oakley can’t find a spittoon, Tweed says — in a withering, condescending tone — “We use ashtrays here, Mayor. This isn’t the city hall.”

Gregory Ratoff’s Moss Rose is a murder mystery set in Victorian London. It stars Peggy Cummins — a beautiful blond actress who looks like a doll come to life — as Rose Lynton, a Cockney chorus girl. Rose works under the stage name “Belle Adair.” She may have grown up in Shoreditch, but she aspires to be a fine lady.

Margo Woode plays Rose’s friend Daisy Arrow, a fellow actress who has a mysterious boyfriend. He’s a handsome, well-dressed gentleman who Rose only catches glimpses of as he moves in and out of the shadows. Daisy only appears in a handful of scenes before Rose discovers her corpse in bed in the room they share, an open Bible lying on the bed next to her with a dried and pressed moss rose laid across its pages. Was it her suitor who killed her? Or someone else?

Vincent Price — always a welcome sight — plays Inspector Clinner, the Scotland Yard detective who investigates the case along with his lumpy little partner, Deputy Inspector Evans (Rhys Williams). Soon, the identity of Daisy’s suitor becomes clear. He’s a wealthy gentleman named Michael Drego, and he’s played by the always oily Victor Mature, whose lack of a British accent is explained away by the fact that his Canadian father took him away from England when he was very young.

Rose plays girl detective, and it’s not long before she seems to be two steps ahead of the police in identifying Michael as Daisy’s murderer. At first it’s unclear what she wants from him, or why she fails to identify him to the police. She initially blackmails him, but then gives the money back and tells him that all she wants is for him to take her with him to his home, Charmley Manor, for just two weeks. Michael denies that he is guilty of Daisy’s murder, but he tells Rose he’ll go along with her scheme because he’s desperate to keep his family’s name out of the spotlight.

Most of the film takes place at Charmley Manor, which is presided over by Michael’s mother, Lady Margaret (played by the grandest Hollywood dame of them all, Ethel Barrymore).

Lady Margaret keeps her son’s childhood room exactly as it was, because when he was taken away by his father, she knew it was the last time she’d ever see that little boy again. She doesn’t allow anyone in the room, not even the servants, but after her first flash of rage at Rose when she discovers her snooping around the room, she softens, and tells Rose that there’s nothing like a secret to bring two people together.

Complicating matters for Rose at Charmley Manor is the presence of Michael’s fiancée, the beautiful Audrey Ashton (Patricia Medina). Lady Margaret grows to accept Rose, even going so far as to tell people that she is her “companion,” but Audrey sees Rose as a threat to her impending nuptials, and rightly so.

Moss Rose is based on The Crime of Laura Saurelle, one of author Joseph Shearing’s many Gothic thrillers, which were quite popular at the time of the film’s release. (Shearing was one of several pseudonyms used by writer Marjorie Bowen.) It’s a decent whodunnit that will keep you guessing. Michael Drego is the prime suspect, but Inspector Clinner loves flowers — moss rose in particular — and he’s played by Vincent Price, so he always seems suspicious, especially when he’s cutting himself a piece of moss rose in Lady Margaret’s greenhouse and he has a maniacal gleam in his eye. There is also Lady Margaret’s intense-looking butler, Craxton (George Zucco), and as we all know, butlers are always under suspicion. The ladies aren’t exempt from suspicion, either. We learn that Audrey made a mysterious bulk purchase of three Bibles just like the one found next to Daisy Arrow’s corpse, and she’s obviously jealous of any woman in whom Michael shows an interest. And Lady Margaret is hard-headed and clear-eyed, but she seems like a different person whenever she speaks of her son.

Despite the wealth of suspects, Moss Rose turned out exactly how I thought it would, but it wasn’t a bad way to kill some time.

Litvak, who was born in Kiev, worked in the Soviet cinema system in Leningrad, in the pre-war film industry of Berlin, in France after Hitler’s rise to power, and finally in Hollywood, where he became a contract director for Warner Bros. in 1937. Litvak became an American citizen in 1940, enlisted in the Army, and worked with Frank Capra on his Why We Fight series of short films. Litvak finished the war with the rank of colonel and returned to directing Hollywood features. Two of his most famous films would follow — Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) and The Snake Pit (1948).

The Long Night, his first post-war feature, is less well-known. For a long time, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who remembered seeing it. But thanks to a pristine print on DVD from Kino Video (released in 2000 along with a VHS version), this flawed but worthwhile drama is now widely available. In the special features section of the Kino DVD, there are a couple of side-by-side comparisons with Le Jour se lève — a murder sequence in a darkened stairwell and the first meeting of the two lovers — that show how heavily Litvak borrowed from Carné’s film, at least stylistically. (The ending of The Long Night is radically different from the ending of Le Jour se lève, however, which is a standard practice in Hollywood remakes of depressing European art films.)

Despite the happy ending, Litvak infuses The Long Night with a pervasive sense of doom. After shooting a man in his apartment building in an unnamed steel town somewhere near the Pennsylvania-Ohio state line, Joe Adams (Henry Fonda) sits alone in his rented room, the door barricaded as police and onlookers swarm the street below his window. Accompanied by a refrain from Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, Joe tells his story through flashbacks, and we learn what brought him to this desperate place. “How can I explain when I don’t understand myself?” he thinks to himself.

Joe Adams grew up in an orphanage. “Class of ’34,” he tells the pretty young Jo Ann (Barbara Bel Geddes) when he meets her. (We must presume that Joe is younger than the man who plays him, since Fonda was 29 years old in 1934.) Jo Ann also came from the orphanage, and her romance with Joe is simple, childlike, and profound. Fonda plays Joe as a sweet-natured boy with no ability to plan long-term or handle disappointment or frustration. Bel Geddes plays Jo Ann in much the same way, but instead of being petulant she is naïve and unworldly, and open to the manipulation of a slimy magician named Maximilian the Great (Vincent Price).

Maximilian is a congenital liar. His relationship with Jo Ann is nebulous for some time in the film. He first tells Joe that Jo Ann is his daughter, but that he had to go on the road for 15 years and leave her in the company of strangers. After another series of flashbacks, however, it becomes clear that Maximilian and Jo Ann were romantically involved. He took her to see the Cleveland Symphony when she had never been as far west as Pittsburgh, and forced himself on her when she had never been kissed. Jo Ann was uncomfortable with Maximilian’s actions, but she was also lonely, and Maximilian offered her a world of excitement and glamor.

The visual style of The Long Night, its doomed protagonist buffeted by forces outside of his control, and its story told through flashbacks are all hallmarks of film noir, but it also has elements of social realism. For instance, Joe befriends Maximilian’s assistant Charlene (played by the always wonderful Ann Dvorak). He lies on her bed on a Sunday afternoon, reading the funnies, in her crummy room full of clutter, next to a couple of big bottles of beer and a bag of pretzels he brought for them to eat. She provides a stack of toast. She’s in the bath when he arrives, and throws on a slinky silk robe. It’s unclear how close Joe and Charlene really are, but the realism of the setting and the intimacy of the situation push the limits of Hays Code acceptability.

Along with the realism and intimacy of some of the interior settings, there’s plenty of artifice in The Long Night. Unlike the typical Hollywood production in which backdrops were either matte paintings or rear-projection film, production designer Eugène Lourié used elaborate sets with tricks of forced perspective in The Long Night. For example, a factory on a hillside in the distance is really a small model that could be lit in whichever way the filmmakers wanted. Lourié and Litvak intended to achieve a kind of “poetic reality,” and they succeeded. At the same time, the artifice sometimes clashes with the realism, and when it does the film feels aimless.

The Long Night was a commercial and critical failure, and lost approximately $1 million, but it was also the springboard for Barbara Bel Geddes’s long onscreen career. After seeing her performance in the film, RKO signed her to a seven-picture deal.

The Web is a classic case of mediocre material made incredibly entertaining by an excellent cast and a good director. The film’s plot may be run-of-the-mill, but the film itself is never boring.

The exciting opening takes the viewer along the busy Manhattan streets and overpasses that lead to Grand Central Station and culminates in a tearful reunion between an old man, Leopold Kroner (Fritz Leiber), and his daughter Martha (Maria Palmer). Kroner has just been released from prison, and he is surprised that “Mr. Colby” didn’t come to meet him at the train station. The viewer immediately knows that something sinister is going on, because we see a mug trailing Kroner and his daughter through the train station.

Next, we meet brash young attorney Robert Regan (Edmond O’Brien), who’s trying to force his way into Andrew Colby Enterprises to see the man in charge. When he pushes through several sets of doors and finally meets Noel Faraday (Ella Raines), he demands to see Mr. Colby. When she’s asks what his business with Mr. Colby is, he says, “Well, he’s been carrying on with my grandmother, and I’d like to find out what his intentions are.” When Noel tells him that she’s Mr. Colby’s personal secretary, he responds, “Well that just goes to show you how far a girl can get if she keeps her stocking seams straight.”

Their dialogue continues in this vein for the rest of the picture. Regan is the kind of person who would be known today in some circles as a “jerk,” and if he said half the things he says in The Web during working hours he’d be sued for sexual harassment.

But he’s also a tireless crusader for his clients, which becomes clear when he finally comes face to face with Andrew Colby, who’s played with smooth, villainous charm by the one and only Vincent Price. Regan is there to serve him with a summons on behalf of his client, Emilio Canepa (Tito Vuolo). As a result of Colby’s negligent driving, Canepa’s pushcart and load of bananas were damaged to the tune of $68.72.

Colby sees in Regan’s bullheaded doggedness an opportunity, and offers Regan a $5,000 retainer to come and work for him. Colby tells Regan that five years ago, his business associate Leopold Kroner took nearly $1 million worth of bonds belonging to Colby’s firm, made duplicates, and sold the counterfeit bonds. He was caught and sent to prison, but now that Kroner has been released, Colby claims he’s been threatening him. Colby has a big deal coming up, and he doesn’t want it known that his life is being threatened. If he hired a bodyguard, it would become public knowledge.

If he just hired another lawyer, however, no one would think twice. All Colby asks of Regan is that he work for him for two weeks as a bodyguard and tell no one what he’s doing.

If you know what the word “patsy” means, you’ll probably have no difficulty figuring out what Colby really wants Regan for.

Rounding out the excellent main cast is William Bendix as Lt. Damico, Regan’s friend on the force. Bendix was equally adept at playing tough guys and clowns, and he gets to flex both his dramatic and comic acting muscles as the long-suffering Damico, who’s a lot wiser than Regan gives him credit for.

Even though he’s the protagonist, O’Brien is probably the weakest link in the film. Regan isn’t a very interesting character, and he’s mostly only good for one-liners, but at least they’re decent one-liners. O’Brien’s innuendo-laced banter with Raines isn’t quite Tracy-Hepburn or Bogie-Bacall, but it’s clever and fast-paced enough to satisfy discriminating noir fans, and Raines’s dark beauty and way with a retort elevate their exchanges.

The screenplay by William Bowers and Bertram Millhauser (based on a story by Harry Kurnitz) really crackles in the dialogue department, which makes up for the pedestrian plot. Director Michael Gordon keeps things moving along nicely, and delivers a satisfying final product. The Web might not be a classic film noir, but it’s thoroughly entertaining.

Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Dragonwyck was adapted from Anya Seton’s best-selling 1944 historical novel of the same name. I haven’t read Seton’s novel, but I loved this film, and would like to dig into the book some day. Based on the description on the back cover, the introduction, and the first several pages that I leafed through, the film is a relatively faithful adaptation, as far as these things go. Neither Edgar Allan Poe nor Herman Melville make an appearance in the film, however, and the Astor Place massacre and steamboat racing both, sadly, fell outside the scope of the film.

But that’s par for the course in any 100-minute long adaptation of a 350-page novel. Taken purely as a cinematic experience, Dragonwyck is an engrossing Gothic melodrama that treads lightly the tricky boundary between romance and horror. As a Vincent Price fan, I especially loved his performance in this film. In my review of Shock, which was released earlier the same year, I mentioned that it was the first role I’d seen Vincent Price play in which there was a glimmering of the horror icon he would become. Well, he continued to blossom in this role. While never descending into outright horror territory, Dragonwyck gave Price an opportunity to exhibit more range than any role I’d seen him play previously, and the way his character changes drives the film; from coldly aristocratic to warmly romantic, and from a wielder of petty power to a broken drug addict.

The film begins in 1844. Miranda Wells (Gene Tierney) is a bright, beautiful young woman who longs to see the world. She lives on a small New England farm with her younger siblings, her mother Abigail (Anne Revere), and her deeply religious and strait-laced father Ephraim (Walter Huston). The Wellses receive a letter from their distant cousin, Nicholas Van Ryn (Price), who wishes to take Miranda away from her simple surroundings and employ her as a governess and companion to his young daughter at his home, Dragonwyck Manor, on the Hudson River. After much deliberation, Ephraim assents, even though Van Ryn’s wealth and atheism distress him. Like everything else in the film, Huston’s portrayal is fully realized. The character could have been portrayed as a two-dimensional Bible-thumper, but Huston crafts a believable and sympathetic character.

Once Miranda arrives at Dragonwyck, the obvious touchstone is Jane Eyre, but instead of a madwoman locked in the attic, there is merely Van Ryn’s fussy, compulsively overeating wife Johanna (Vivienne Osborne). Theirs is clearly a loveless marriage, and as soon as we learn that Van Ryn is not really Miranda’s cousin by blood, we can read the handwriting on the wall.

The story takes a lot of interesting turns, however, and I wasn’t ever quite sure what was going to happen next. While Van Ryn is portrayed sympathetically, he is also deeply flawed. A “patroon,” he forces his tenant farmers to pay tribute to him while he sits on a throne. It’s an anachronistic display of power, even for the mid-nineteenth century, and shows early in the film that all may not be well in Dragonwyck.

Dragonwyck also has an excellent sense of place. As Seton said in her introduction to the novel, “There was, on the Hudson, a way of life such as this, and there was a house not unlike Dragonwyck. All Gothic magnificence and eerie manifestations were not at that time inevitably confined to English castles or Southern plantations!”

Alfred L. Werker’s thriller Shock, which had its premiere on January 10, 1946, and went into wide release on February 1st, stars Vincent Price as the murderous Dr. Richard Cross and Lynn Bari as his manipulative assistant and lover, Nurse Elaine Jordan. If you were to play a drinking game in which you took a shot of whiskey every time one of the characters in the film said the word “shock,” you would likely require medical attention after the first 20 minutes.

Price wasn’t always a horror icon. In Tower of London (1939), which was as much a costume drama about Richard III as it was a horror picture, he was a supporting player. In Brigham Young (1940), he played the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith. In Hudson’s Bay (1941), he played King Charles II. In Laura (1944) and Leave Her to Heaven (1945), he was the aggrieved “other man.” A tall, stately man born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1911, Price was educated at Yale, where he studied art history and fine art. He radiated charm and erudition. He was a fine actor, and probably could have distinguished himself in any genre. As chance or fate would have it, however, his vocal delivery and arch facial expressions were perfectly suited to the ironic cinematic world of the macabre, and he is best remembered for his roles in horror pictures such as House of Wax (1953), The Fly (1958), House on Haunted Hill (1959), The Tingler (1959), and the innumerable Roger Corman-produced, Poe-influenced horror pictures that he appeared in throughout the 1960s.

While Shock is not a horror film, it has elements of one, and it’s the earliest role I’ve seen Price play in which he demonstrates some of the ghoulish mannerisms that would later make him famous. He doesn’t come close to the histrionics of some of his later horror roles, but there are some glimmerings.

The film opens in San Francisco, where a young woman named Janet (played by the somewhat sickly looking ingénue Anabel Shaw), is checking into a hotel, where she is to meet her husband, Lt. Paul Stewart (Frank Latimore), a former P.O.W. who is finally returning from World War II. Lt. Stewart doesn’t show up when he is supposed to, however, and as his emotionally fragile wife frets alone in her hotel room, she witnesses a murder. From her balcony, she can see through the window of an adjacent room. A man and a woman are arguing, and eventually the man settles the argument with a heavy candlestick.

Witnessing a murder drives Janet into a state of catatonic shock. When her husband finally arrives, she is unresponsive. When world-renowned psychiatrist Dr. Cross is brought in to consult in the case, Janet doesn’t recognize him, but Dr. Cross immediately realizes that the cause of Janet’s state of shock is the murder she witnessed him committing.

Janet is placed in Dr. Cross’s care, and he ignores the Hippocratic oath in order to save his own skin, giving Janet insulin treatments she doesn’t need, as well as using other unethical methods of driving her deeper into a state of shock so she will never be able to identify him. Cross isn’t portrayed as a total monster, however. That role is reserved for his lover, Nurse Jordan, a Lady Macbeth type who goads him on when his resolve to be wicked falters.

Shock is a programmer, to be sure, but it’s a well-made one, and kept me enthralled for all of its 70 minutes.